CNN Presidential Town Hall with Mayor Pete Buttigieg moderated by Anderson Cooper live from Manchester, New Hampshire, April 23, 2019. (Photo: David Holloway/CNN)

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg was the focus of his second CNN town hall late Monday. But whereas his first such event early last month was more about his biography and views on Vice President Mike Pence, the 11 p.m. conversation with voters moderated by Anderson Cooper delved more into specifics.

Topics included Buttigieg's relative lack of policy positions, his views on corporate power in politics, immigration reform, a student loan debt forgiveness proposal by fellow candidate U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, free trade and more. You can watch the video of the event here.

What are Pete Buttigieg's policies?

Cooper led with questions on a topic of growing concern about the South Bend mayor's candidacy: his lack of policy positions and the difficulty of comparing his stances to those of other Democrats in the field.

Buttigieg acknowledged early in his response a "tool coming online shortly" on his website that allows keyword searches.

"We'll continue to roll out specific policy proposals, too," Buttigieg told Cooper, "but I also think it's important that we not drown people in minutiae before we've vindicated the values that animate our policies."

This resource, MeetPete.org, is more a multimedia archive with content tagged by hundreds of topics than a concise list of policy positions.

Corporate America in politics

"The biggest problem I have with corporate America is the way that concentrations of wealth and corporate power have turned into concentrations of political power," Buttigieg said in response to a question from Boston University journalism student Hannah Schoenbaum.

Buttigieg went on to criticize the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that political spending is a form of protected speech, saying he'd even be in favor of a constitutional amendment to counteract it.

CNN Presidential Town Hall with Mayor Pete Buttigieg moderated by Anderson Cooper live from Manchester, New Hampshire, April 23, 2019.(Photo: David Holloway, David Holloway/CNN )

Buttigieg on immigration reform

He took a question from Harvard student Leo Garcia about the fate the more than 10 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally vs. the more select group of young immigrants often known as Dreamers who were brought to the U.S. as children and whose presence here is protected through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

"What we need to do," Buttigieg said of the larger group of immigrants, "is make sure there is a pathway to citizenship for them too." He also cited the need for a "level of protection for 'Dreamers,'" reforms to clear backlogs in lawful immigration and "reasonable measures on border security."

He blamed the current stalemate involving broader immigration reform on a calculation in Washington to keep people divided for short-term political gain.

In his reply, Buttigieg said the city's police department isn't responsible for enforcing federal immigration policy and noted that the Justice Department was unable to define what a sanctuary city is in a previous dispute.

"I guess the president thinks America is full. We're not. I would be delighted -- we have a population growth strategy in our city -- our city was built for 130,000 people," Buttigieg said, "We only have 100,000 because so many people left after the auto factories collapsed in the '60s. We got plenty of room for more residents and taxpayers who want to help fund the snowplowing and firefighters that I've got to have for 130,000 people's worth of city."

Kokomo native asks about NAFTA

Kokomo native Christian Abney, now a Harvard student, asked Buttigieg how his administration would negotiate trade and bring success to American industry, noting that Buttigieg had once described NAFTA as creating irreplaceable job losses across the Midwest.

Buttigieg didn't outline specific policy ideas but did say he wanted to see more situations like a car manufacturing facility near South Bend where union auto workers are making electric vehicles for a Silicon Valley startup with investment funds from China.

He also underscored the role that technology and automation play in job losses, pointing out the workforce at the aforementioned car plant "does it with hundreds of workers, not thousands or tens of thousands." Buttigieg also called for measures that would help people negatively affected by free trade. "There's no building a wall around the status quo. You can't put the horse back in the barn, it doesn't work that way."

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Elizabeth Warren's student loan proposal

Cooper, in a follow-up to a question about student loans, asked Buttigieg what he thought of a proposal floated by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (who participated in her own town hall earlier Monday evening) that would give loan relief to households making less than $250,000 a year, with $50,000 in loan cancellation for families making less than $100,000 a year.

It would be funded with a 2% tax on wealth above $50 million and a 3% tax on wealth above $1 billion, her campaign said. Buttigieg said he wasn't sure about allowing people at the top of the income threshold to participate in such a program but found the proposal "pretty appealing."

CNN Presidential Town Hall with Mayor Pete Buttigieg moderated by Anderson Cooper live from Manchester, New Hampshire, April 23, 2019.(Photo: David Holloway, David Holloway/CNN )

She asked him what lesson he learned from criticism about the initiative, particularly as it affected South Bend's African American and Latino residents, and how those lessons would inform national legislation.

"No policy is perfect, and we learned some things on this one." In particular, he said, the policy made it hard to discern out-of-town landlords who "thought of these houses as lines on a spreadsheet" from investors who owned a few homes.

It also led to several situations, he said, involving people who would buy a property with the intention of fixing it up only to later discover that the property was on the city's list of vacant/abandoned homes to be demolished.

"Over time, we learned to be more in dialogue with homeowners, at least when we could figure out who they were, and had a bit of a lighter touch or at least a more accommodating conversation between the enforcement side and the homeownership side."

Police department scandal

Harvard student London Vallery asked Buttigieg what is on the tape recordings at the heart of a South Bend Police Department scandal in which Buttigieg demoted Darryl Boykins, the city's first African-American police chief, not long after the mayor took office in 2012.

Buttigieg has said he made that decision after learning the chief was using the tapes -- which captured conversations of some police officers without their consent -- inappropriately.

In his reply to Vallery's question Monday night, Buttigieg said he didn't know and hasn't sought to listen to them out of concern their creation may have violated federal wiretapping laws.

The matter is the subject of a costly court battle, the most expensive in the city's history, in which the City Council has sued the city. Buttigieg has said previously, however, that that he's heard they are racially charged.